a content comparison of the verbal speeches delivered
by george herbert walker bush (1992) and george walker bush (2000)

The Spearman's Rho of the five master variable scores produced a low correlation (r=.3). This was not entirely surprising, as each of the different variables is weighted differently, and even slight differences in certain areas can throw off the correlation coefficient.

The computation of the Spearman's Rho of the 35 individual variables provided a much higher correlation (r=.7625), indicating that there were significant correlations between the two men's individual scores. This result shows that whether intentionally or unintentionally, both George Bushes tend to include many of the same inflections and centers of focus in their speeches.

Individually, the correlations between individual variables break down rather quickly. At the individual level, President Bush's scores tend to be significantly higher than his son's in virtually every category. For a detailed look at these differences, see Figure 1 below.

Table 1 shows that the average scores of President Bush tend to be significantly higher than those of his son (the difference in the third column is computed by subtracting Governor Bush's scores from his father's scores. Only on the variables of Centrality, Rapport and Exclusion did Governor Bush score higher, and then the difference was not tremendous.

There also appear to be distinct differences in the characteristics of the speeches themselves. President Bush delivered more speeches than did Governor Bush, and his speeches tended to be longer in length. Since DICTION tends to break up large passages of text into 500-word blocks, the analysis produced an interesting side note: President Bush's speeches had to be broken into an average of 4.2 units, where Governor Bush's speeches were broken into 1.68 units. Although the statistical implications of this point are not particularly defensible (after all, the two data sets were derived from different sources and organized in different ways), it does suggest that President Bush spoke much more often than his son and had more to say when he did speak.

In addition, the number of characters per word in each set of speeches was noticeably different. President Bush used words that averaged 8.68 characters per word, while Governor Bush tended to use words that contained an average of 4.98 characters. While this observation is not as indicative of oratory prowess as a syllable count would be, the amount of the difference is interesting.

Variable	Pres. Bush	Gov. Bush	Difference
Certainty	94.28	46.51	47.77
Tenacity	62.00	18.98	43.02
Leveling	11.44	4.76	6.68
Collectives	16.35	8.20	46.42
Insistence	54.12	46.42	7.70
Numerical	19.29	4.74	14.55
Ambivalence	21.85	6.33	15.52
Self-ref.	28.27	3.62	24.65
Variety	1.00	0.58	0.42
Optimism	107.13	49.37	57.76
Praise	10.32	4.57	5.75
Satisfaction	23.12	2.81	20.31
Inspiration	9.37	6.45	2.92
Blame	2.73	1.25	1.49
Hardship	6.83	4.01	2.83
Denial	10.08	3.69	6.40
Activity	102.30	50.92	51.38
Aggression	6.99	4.90	2.08
Accomplish.	22.15	11.58	3.82
Communication	12.39	3.82	8.57
Motion	10.83	1.25	9.58
Cognitive Terms	16.71	6.13	10.59
Passivity	10.76	3.79	6.97
Embellishment	0.81	0.72	0.09
Realism	100.86	43.39	57.47
Familiarity	234.68	86.32	148.36
Spatial Awareness	20.75	9.20	11.55
Temporal Awareness	24.13	9.33	14.80
Present Concern	33.06	9.10	23.96
Human Interest	61.59	17.49	44.09
Concreteness	44.37	18.95	25.43
Past Concern	6.95	1.79	5.16
Complexity	8.68	4.98	3.70
Commonality	97.58	50.10	47.48
Centrality	1.68	3.82	-2.13
Cooperation	6.13	4.36	1.77
Rapport	1.51	2.04	-0.53
Diversity	3.46	1.35	2.12
Exclusion	1.21	1.82	-0.60
Liberation	3.05	2.21	0.84

Figure 1: Mean variable scores for President Bush (1992) and Governor Bush (2000)

Introduction

Literature Review

Methodology

Results

Discussion

Reference List